Edvard Munch – Self-Portrait with Cigarette

Self-Portrait with Cigarette

Self-Portrait with Cigarette by Edvard Munch is an oil painting on canvas of 1895, held under inventory number NG.M.00470 by the National Museum (Nasjonalmuseet) in Oslo. The original measures 85.5 x 110.5 cm and stands upright. The painter shows himself at half length, turned straight towards the viewer, a cigarette burning between the fingers of a raised hand.

He wears a dark suit with a white collar and a dark bow tie. His right hand is lifted in front of his chest; the cigarette smoulders between the fingers and the smoke rises as a thin bright thread beside the right side of his head. Face and hand are lit from below, as if by footlights, so that the cheeks and forehead are the brightest plane on the canvas. The eyes are wide open and look straight out. The lower part of the body dissolves into bluish grey and violet vertical drags, so that the figure literally disappears into the background towards the lower edge. The background itself is a smoky blue-grey field without space and without objects; around the head the light gathers a little and reads as a pale glow. The figure takes almost the full height of the canvas and stands a little left of centre, leaving room at the right for the rising smoke. There is nothing else: no furniture, no window, no floor by which to measure a distance.

The canvas is signed and dated: E.Munch 1895. The painter was thirty-one at the time, with an eventful Berlin period behind him. Lighting a sitter from below was unusual in the portraiture of those years, and so was letting the body be lost into the background at its edges – an unusually open image of uncertainty for a self-portrait. The 1890s were the decade in which most of his best-known motifs were made, and this self-portrait belongs squarely inside it.

Munch laid the paint on thin and runny. Along the lower edge of the canvas the runs of colour that trickled downward are still visible, and he did not remove them. The hand with the cigarette is the brightest passage in the work and leads the eye before the face does; that emphasis is what gave the painting its title. The strokes are long and vertical, so that suit and background merge into a single movement. The palette is narrowed to blue-grey, black, white and a warm skin tone; outside the face and the hand there is no pure colour anywhere. It is that refusal of colour which leaves the face so exposed.

Ours is hand-painted in oil on canvas, brush stroke by brush stroke, made to order and never a print. Because every canvas is made individually, tones and strokes differ slightly from one to the next; those small differences are the mark of a hand rather than a flaw. The hardest passage here is the transition between face and background, which must stay soft without letting the face be lost. As a hand-painted oil reproduction this motif asks above all for a steady hand in the light on the cheeks.

The painting is dark and concentrated, so it works best on a quiet wall out of direct light: a study, a library or a hallway, where it can be looked at from close to. Its bluish grey and black sit well with darker wood and light walls. Because the motif is a single face, it needs no neighbour and carries a solitary hanging. Among reproductions on canvas this is one not to hang opposite a window, since the reflection would eat exactly the darkest passages out of which the figure rises. The motif is upright and tightly cropped, so it also carries a narrow wall, an alcove, or the wall beside a staircase, where the viewer meets it close to.

Ten sizes are available along with a custom size, and every canvas can be ordered framed or unframed. You choose the frame in our 3D app, where mouldings and colours can be tried against this motif; a narrow dark frame works better here than a wide pale one. More of the artist is in the Edvard Munch gallery, and we write about his life and painting on the Edvard Munch blog.